The October Palace - Hardcover

Jane Hirschfield

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060553480 ISBN 13: 9780060553487

Synopsis

Jane Hirshfield's third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain.

About this title

Review:

"Jane Hirshfield's new collection of poems, "The October Palace," is an exquisite accomplishment. These serene and painterly mediations quietly blossom into luminous and sensual lyric reckonings. There is an astonishing grace and unparalleled beauty to Jane Hirshfield's poetry; everywhere, the eddies and currents of the natural world reveal themselves to us in their delicate, metaphysical reflections. The cycles of loss ad return, the seasonal rhythms of growth and death, all gather in this volume like the braided strands of a river, as we move towards the book's twin shores of redemption--forgiveness and love." -- David St. John"The prevailing emotional tone in our poetry is elegiac: the lament, doubtless spiced by fear, is for the speed and relentlessness of change. But Jane Hirshfield's poems praise the ceaseless mutability of life as its central splendor. Thus her poems, with their rare combination of grace and velocity, offer us not only their own considerable pleasures, but habits of perception quite different from what our poetry customarily offers." -- William Matthews"Jane Hirshfield's new collection shows her distinctive imagination, clearly nourished by serious commitment to the practice of Buddhist mediation but by no means narrow in range. I enjoy her attentiveness, the concrete details and musicality of her images, and the way abstract and concrete interweave in illumination throughout her work. "The October Palace" is a book to welcome and often return to." -- Denise Levertov

From the Back Cover:

Jane Hirshfield's long-awaited third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain. The poems address subjects ranging from the importance of "sabbath" moments in which nothing seems to happen and the love between two aged horses to Lavoisier's discovery of modern chemistry and the 1989 "velvet revolutions" of Eastern Europe. Grounded in a series of meditations upon the life of the feeling heart in the world - a heart envisioned as an almost independent being, whose own needs and desires require of us integration, acceptance, and finally praise - The October Palace is contemplative and sensuous, intellectual and emotional, philosophical and musical, and, above all, serious in its encounter with precisely experienced and deeply questioned life.

About this edition

• ISBN 10: 0060553480
• ISBN 13: 9780060553487
• Binding: Hardcover